Yes 66% (605)

No 34% (307)

One clear night in February, inside a white-tableclothed Italian restaurant in the Gaslamp Quarter, diners gathered for an eight course, all-foie gras dinner. Bice Ristorante was bidding a tasteful adieu to the delicacy months before it would be banned from California shelves and menus.

On the sidewalk outside the trendy restaurant, the foie-gras farewell looked more grotesque: A dozen members of the San Diego-based Animal Protection and Rescue League (APRL) held grim posters and banners of force-fed ducks caked in yellow mash, metal pipes hanging from their beaks.

Leading that protest was someone smack in the middle of California’s foie gras ban: San Diego lawyer Bryan Pease. He is the co-founder of APRL, and for the last decade, he has been the very public face of the movement to ban foie gras.

Animal activist and San Diego lawyer Bryan Pease worked to get foie gras banned in California. — John Gibbins

“A lot of chefs are trying to frame this as an issue about choice, which this isn’t. It’s about animal cruelty,” decried Pease, a vegan who, at 16, refused to dissect animals at his New York high school.

Even though the foie gras law was passed in 2004, Pease has continued a series of protests against the controversial fatty duck livers “to let people know why it’s being banned.”

Starting next Sunday, the production or sale (not the possession or consumption) of foie gras will illegal in California, making the state the first in the nation to make its production a crime.

Veterinarians have testified for both sides of the debate on whether birds unduly suffer when they’re force-fed to enlarge their livers, the standard method of making foie gras. California lawmakers, pressed by animal-welfare groups — including Pease’s APRL — decided it was inhumane.

Since, foie-gras bans have been proposed in several state legislatures including New York, Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maryland. None has passed.

The end of the line

Foie gras — French for “fat liver,” pronounced fwah grah and prized for its buttery, slightly gamy flavor — was not produced on any significant scale in America until 1981. Currently, a half million ducks are processed by the nation’s $40-million foie gras industry, comprised of just three U.S. farms. (While geese are the fattened liver of choice in Hungary and France, America uses ducks.)

An immigrant from El Salvador who studied foie-gras farming in France, Guillermo Gonzalez is in the process of shutting down his 26-year-old business, but the financial impact can be traced back to the early days of the battle.

A 2003 anti-cruelty suit filed by Pease and San Rafael-based In Defense of Animals had cost Gonzalez $400,000, according to published reports, around the time SB 1520 was being considered.

“Our family farm just happened to be an easy target in the larger anti-meat agenda,” Gonzalez said. “You have to understand that, at the time, the opponents were executing an orchestrated campaign that included trespassing, vandalism, intimidation, legislation and costly litigation all aimed at our family business.”

Negotiations led to two concessions on the 2004 bill: a grace period of more than seven years before the ban would take effect, and Gonzalez receiving immunity from civil lawsuits.

One of America’s leading voices about food and agriculture said the ban misses a larger target: barbaric conditions for animals on industrial farms. Michael Pollan, the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” said when you take into account how many American foie-gras farms there are, the California ban is “strictly a symbolic issue.”

“Our focus should be on mainstream animal agriculture, where abuses are routine, and such practices are heavily defended by lobbyists and paid-for legislators,” Pollan said. “Way too much time is spent on banning foie gras.”

Enforcement in San Diego

You'll receive a civil penalty if you produce or sell foie gras. Investigations and citations will be overseen locally by the County Department of Animal Services (in Carlsbad, Del Mar, Encinitas, San Diego, Santee, Solana Beach and unincorporated areas). Peace officers and the state health department can also enforce the new law. It is still legal to possess or consume foie gras.

Other foods that are banned in California

Horse meat can’t be sold for human consumption. The possession or sale of shark fin is illegal, as is killing “any animal traditionally or commonly kept as a pet” for food.

Similar foie gras bans

Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway and the United Kingdom have banned the force-feeding of birds for foie gras.

Brushes with the law

Bryan Pease led a series of protests against the controversial fatty duck livers “to let people know why it’s being banned.” Here is the foie gras protest outside Bice Ristorante in the Gaslamp. — K.C. Alfred

Tall with wavy hair, Pease isn’t just the animal-rights activist. He’s also the guy who got 7 percent of the vote in San Diego’s recent District 1 City Council race. But he’s better known for legal and physical tangles related to the seals at the La Jolla Children’s Pool. In a fight with a beachgoer, Pease used a stun gun and pleaded no contest to misdemeanor assault.

“I wish I’d punched him in the face,” Pease said recently about the 2004 incident. “I’m 34. If you’re going to hold stuff against me that I said and did in my 20s, I don’t think people want to be held to that same standard.”

In the summer of 2002, a 24-year-old Pease started an animal-rights organization in Oakland. After staking out a Central Valley duck slaughterhouse and tailing a truck back to an unmarked farm, his group discovered the state’s only foie gras producer. Because of its name, they had been looking in Sonoma, but in fact it was located in Farmington.

Pease said dozens of times he trespassed on that property and broke into duck sheds with fellow activists. It’s the kind of civil disobedience that his father, an assistant U.S. attorney based in New York, had always discouraged.

With his Sony Hi8 Handycam, Pease filmed there, and later joined East Coast activists to secretly film at the nation’s largest duck-liver producer, Hudson Valley Foie Gras, in New York.

Mark Caro’s 2009 book “Foie Gras Wars” details how California banned foie gras and how foie gras was outlawed in Chicago in 2006, only to be repealed two years later after restaurants led a resistance. In it, Caro, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, credits Pease’s activist camera crew with capturing the No. 1 “shock moment in anti-foie gras horror montages” and “the foie gras debate’s dominant imagery.” The footage — first aired in 2003 by a San Francisco ABC-TV affiliate — shows a pair of bloody ducks that appear too weak to fight off a hungry rat’s attack.

Coming Thursday in Business

A look at the local impact of the foie gras ban.

Taking sides

“Geez Louise, they’re aggressive,” Pearla Geha said, hurrying inside North Park’s Urban Solace, a neighborhood spot known for cheese biscuits and sustainable comfort food. It was late April, and Pease and fellow protesters were outside the restaurant’s entrance.

One local preparation of foie gras. The law taking effect July 1 will ban the sale or production of foie gras in California. — Earnie Grafton

“I don’t even eat animals,” Geha said, taking a seat at the bar, where bartenders wore black T-shirts printed with a goose image and the words “In foie gras we trust.”

On the menu that night was seared, slightly pink duck liver from Sonoma-Artisan Foie Gras. Urban Solace’s chef and owner, Matt Gordon, is an active member in a chef group lobbying Sacramento to reconsider the ban. Called the Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards (CHEFS), the group recently drew up a charter suggesting more humane protocols and regulations of the foie industry.

“(It) seems to be a waste of time and energy,” Geha said about the foie-gras protest. “They’ve already won.”

But the CHEFS group’s plea has caught the ear of Sen. Lois Wolk (D-Davis), who voted against SB 1520 when she was in the Assembly: “I have told the chefs and producers of foie gras that if a proposal came forward to amend the California law — not repeal it, but amend it to create an acceptable humane standard for the production of this agricultural product — I would consider carrying the legislation next year.”

By May, a foie protest was met with pushback: The East Village restaurant Cowboy Star hung a banner slamming the foie ban. “SB 1520 takes away your rights,” it said. Along with hormone-free steaks and Seafood Watch-approved fish, foie gras was on its menu. Foodies hung out on the sidewalk and front patio to support the restaurant’s chef, Victor Jimenez, a member of CHEFS. They outnumbered APRL’s nine protesters.